Last week I think many of us who work in international development were quite shocked and disappointed to learn of the scandal with Oxfam employees who paid (?) prostitutes for sex, in housing provided by Oxfam no less. Before we had time to say that this was an isolated incident, it emerged that possibly the same thing had happened in Chad with a man implicated in the Haiti scandal, Roland van Hauwermeiren. These incidents are in no way solely a problem of Oxfam, or of international development more broadly, but rather form a part of the overarching and global challenges around men who commit violence against women and girls with relatively little impunity. I believe this Oxfam story may be the start of the #MeToo movement shining its light on injustices in international development. In this blog post, I'll explain why mobile should urgently be considered as a safeguard to help prevent further abuses of this nature.

Over the Christmas and New Year period, I was back in Dhaka - catching up with friends and family, but also spending time with movers and shakers in the Bangladesh ICT4D space. I spent a day with Drinkwell visiting their mobile-enabled ‘water ATMs’ in low-income communities in Dhaka, and I also spent some time with Ivy Russell and the Maya Apa team.

In my previous blog I outlined how and why we planned to run ‘co-creation workshops’ with a varied group of stakeholders in rural Benin, as part of a UNFPA-funded project run by OneWorld to explore strategies to tackle Gender Based Violence (G.B.V.) using ICTs. The stakeholders included rural women and men, youth peer educators, and the heads of social services and civil servants responsible for local response to cases of violence against women and girls.

Today is the International Day of the Girl and a really important day in the Panoply Digital calendar. Firstly, because it’s a day that highlights the challenges and opportunities that girls around the world face - something that we care about passionately, particularly in ICT - but secondly, because we’re excited to be able to announce our new publication around gender and ICT on such an important day: the Gender and ICT Survey Toolkit.

I always get very excited about anything new around gender and ICT: new publications, new data sets, new projects, new funds or awards, and there have been a number of new gender and ICT publications that have come out recently. One of those is something I’ve been working on and was recently published by GSMA mNutrition: a toolkit and accompanying webinar on how to make an mHealth service more inclusive and reach more women.

A new issue of me and Alex's Gender and Mobiles Newsletter is out, and we are delighted to help spread the word about the eSkills4Girls.org online platform! Launched to help close the digital gender gap, this initiative is a flagship activity of Germany's 2017 G20 presidency.

We've been working with mSTAR, USAID Digital Inclusion and Big Blue Communications to create a 2 minute animation on what the gender digital divide is, and why it matters. The final animation is now public - enjoy!

In the Science journal article "The long-run poverty and gender impacts of mobile money", Suri and Jack (2016) have caused waves with the finding that access and use of M-PESA has lifted an astounding 2% of households out of poverty - with women experiencing the most profound effects of this phenomenon.

This is a special blog post to highlight that two members of the Panoply Digital team have recently achieved significant milestones. Co-Founders Michael Gallagher and Ronda Zelezny-Green are now officially PhD holders! They met before launching the consultancy since they shared Associate Professor Niall Winters (Oxford) as a supporting PhD supervisor on their different but related mobile learning PhD projects.

This past week, I’ve been in Nairobi for workshops with the GSMA Mobile for Development Utilities team and their grantees. And thinking about M&E, lean data, and the use of technology to collect data - and ensuring women are included in that.

For the past five years or so, Panoply Digital co-Founder/Director Alex Tyers and I have been producing the Gender and Mobiles newsletter. It started out initially as the Gender and Mobile Learning newsletter but we quickly found that there was not enough content being written in that area to fill our coffers. This evolution benefited us and our readership greatly as we have been able to highlight a wider range of fascinating stories that illustrate the increasingly complex relationships between women, men, girls, boys and mobile phones.

One of the best things about working on M&E for mobile and ICT programmes is the way you get to work across many different sectors – while I am, like the rest of the wonderful Panoply Digital team, an mEducation specialist by training, I’ve been lucky enough to work across mHealth, mEducation, mAgri and mobile money, to name a few, getting to learn about these different areas and understand the mobile for development sector from a more holistic viewpoint.

Here at Panoply Digital, we work with a number of different clients on the monitoring and evaluation of their mobile services: start-ups / clients from the private sector, clients from the development sector such as NGOs, or with mobile operators.

Last week, I was honored to represent Panoply Digital as a panelist at a high-profile event hosted by the US Ambassador to UNESCO in Paris, looking at girls’ education in Africa. The event was part of the Idea Lab series, bringing stakeholders together to promote dialogue and creative thinking around UNESCO-related issues

One thing we do like to talk about in the ICT4D community is how everyone is working in silos, particularly when it comes to mobile services for women: “no one talks to anyone else, we’re all doing the same thing in the same country, we need to work together more”.

For the past few years I have been honored to provide research support to Global Integrity in its work to "champion transparent and accountable government around the world by producing innovative research and technologies that inform, connect, and empower civic, private, and public reformers seeking more open societies."

I am typing this out from Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi reflecting on the past week spent with the good people of UN Habitat, specifically those associated with the CityRAP tool. The CityRAP tool trains city managers and municipal technicians in small to intermediate sized cities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to understand and plan actions aimed at reducing risk and building resilience through the elaboration of a City Resilience Action Plan.

A few caveats at the onset here. This reads a bit more like an academic piece which it largely is. It is drawn from something larger I wrote a bit ago for another paper. It might also read like an attack on the SDGs, which is not my point. The point here is that the SDGs have generated some incredible results and I sincerely support them, but we must be mindful of what is being mobilised in our pursuit of them. My focus is education and I suggest that the provisions of the SDGs related specifically to that field suggest particular scaled interventions (or at least make those approaches particularly attractive). Scale exacts pressure on particular types of education.

As part of my association with the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh (a version of this post appears there as well), I recently traveled with colleagues to deliver a three day workshop on digital education for Syrian academics who have been displaced by the conflict. The University has worked for a long time with the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), a great organisation providing urgently-needed help to academics in immediate danger, those forced into exile, and many who choose to work on in their home countries despite serious risks.

We seem to have endless ideas on how to use Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). From job creation to women’s empowerment to civic participation, a number of ICT4D interventions have been developed and implemented over the years. Common question asked in my work is “what type of technology that might have biggest impact in our society in the coming years?”. As we have learned, ICTs in itself aren’t sufficient. While factors contributing to the success of ICT4D have become apparent, and many have written about them, I feel there's still a need to highlight some of them.

We have been some of the most vocal critics of Bridge International Academies (BIA), largely because most investigations and evaluations of their edtech impact to improve schooling in sub-Saharan Africa have been less than spectacular (many would say the impact is non-existent). So imagine our surprise to see Wayan Vota's latest ICTworks™ post highlighting the successes of BIA in Liberia.

We need to make women in innovation more visible, and correct the gender imbalance in the stories we tell. We need to tell more stories about the women working at the top of humanitarian innovation, and so today I sat down with Tanya Accone, Senior Advisor at UNICEF Innovation, to tell the story of a woman working at the top of a very visible humanitarian innovation team for a very visible humanitarian agency.

We do a lot of work on open learning as well and it was clear there was tension between these open educational platforms (like Coursera, edX, etc.) and their use in local contexts, particularly in emerging economies. There is tension there. Open educational technologies are too often framed as a transparent instrument for educational export, keeping (specifically Western or Global North) curricula, pedagogy, and educational values intact whilst they are broadcast to a global population in deficit.

I remember when I first started hearing the buzz about bots. My first thought? 'Here we go again...' - a reaction to the endless cycles of hype followed by business-as-usual that typifies the digital sector. However, over the past few months I've had the opportunity to design a few 'bots 4 good', and I'd like to share what I've learned: how they work, what they could be useful for, and where to start if you'd like to get one. I believe that done well, they could be really useful add-ons to your digital strategy as they provide a rich 'in-between' space for mobile users who aren't fully digitally literate.

Last week, I was at TICTeC 2018 where researchers, activists and practitioners discussed the impact of civic technology, or civic tech. This blogpost summarises the discussion of Two heads are better than one: working with governments.